FAST FOOD: TWENTY-SECOND HELPING (2016)

“We don’t cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate, regular-stock, Established Church religions, but we can´t allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.” -Mark Twain

There is nothing that ISIS has done or is doing under the auspices of “God’s will” today that Christians, their Churches and their Church leaders have not first done or are not doing under the auspices of “Deus vult.”

The Telegraph, London, 19 July, 2016

“U.S. air strike killed more than 85 civilians, including children, in Syria on Tuesday. Pictures of the aftermath of the dawn strikes village of Tokhar near Manbij in northern Syria showed the bodies of children as young as three under piles of rubble.”

America Magazine, 4/7/03

“The head of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, said in a letter to his priests on March 25 that members of the armed forces should carry out their duties in good conscience, because they can presume the integrity of the leaders who decided to go to war in Iraq.”

[For the record, the specific people to whom O’Brien says a Catholic can give a presumption of integrity regarding the truthfulness of what they are saying, which then morally permits a Catholic to kill and maim designated enemies, are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, Feith, etc.]

Truth is universally understood to be the first casualty of war. The Greek poet Aeschylus (525BC – 456BC) wrote, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” The evidence of the historical record since 500BC incontestably validates this statement. Those leading a country into war lie without limit or reservation. How then can a Bishop, any Bishop of any diocese, logically and in conformity with the extremely high and strict standard of moral certainty that must be met before engaging in killing people or causing people grave suffering hold and communicate to those in his moral care that the politicians leading a country into war can be presumed to be telling the truth? He can’t. That is fact, not opinion. This is why no Bishop ever even tries to lay out to his people in detail the Catholic moral principles and their logical application on which he is morally permitting them to go to Iraq etc. and kill and maim other people. So as regards Catholic Bishops, it seems, that neither the moral teaching of Jesus in the Gospels nor the moral teaching in Natural Law Catholic Just War Theory applies to them.

Their personal and collective silence gives moral consent—and they know this— to the Catholics of each of their respective dioceses, to go to the Middle East and continue killing and maiming people by the truck load daily. It is more than past time to stop mouthing the U.S. media mantra, “Why don’t moderate Muslim cleric speak out against ISIS terrorism” Straighten out first your own house of God; war is terrorism. Ask why Catholic Bishops for the last thirteen years have not spoken out against American Catholic military terrorists roaming about and ravaging the Arab population and the Arab countries of the Middle East, thousands of time beyond what ISIS has done?

But then, “We don´t cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate, regular-stock, Established Church religions, but we can´t allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.”

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The full embracing of Gospel Nonviolence calls for a radical alteration in thought patterns, verbal patterns, behavioral patterns, and emotional patterns. That is, it requires a completely different reality orientation and self-understanding. To a mind grounded primarily in the logic of the temporal and conditioned by a seemingly endless stream of examples in which violence is portrayed as a legitimate means of conflict resolution, the acceptance of nonviolence as truth does not come easily.